Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
active noise cancellation
open-ear smart glasses
environmental noise
wearable audio
noise reduction
Active noise cancellation on open-ear smart glasses
🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the challenge of applying traditional active noise cancellation (ANC) to open-ear smart glasses, which cannot seal the ear canal and thus suffer from degraded audio performance in noisy environments. The paper presents the first real-time ANC system tailored for such devices, leveraging an eight-microphone array embedded in the eyeglass frame to estimate noise at the ear and a miniature open-ear speaker to generate anti-noise for cancellation. This approach achieves open-ear ANC without requiring in-ear microphones, thereby eliminating the dependency on ear canal occlusion inherent in conventional ANC systems, and supports low-latency real-time processing even during user movement. Experimental results demonstrate an average noise reduction of 9.6 dB in the 100–1000 Hz band, improving to 11.2 dB after brief user calibration.
📝 Abstract
Smart glasses are becoming an increasingly prevalent wearable platform, with audio as a key interaction modality. However, hearing in noisy environments remains challenging because smart glasses are equipped with open-ear speakers that do not seal the ear canal. Furthermore, the open-ear design is incompatible with conventional active noise cancellation (ANC) techniques, which rely on an error microphone inside or at the entrance of the ear canal to measure the residual sound heard after cancellation. Here we present the first real-time ANC system for open-ear smart glasses that suppresses environmental noise using only microphones and miniaturized open-ear speakers embedded in the glasses frame. Our low-latency computational pipeline estimates the noise at the ear from an array of eight microphones distributed around the glasses frame and generates an anti-noise signal in real-time to cancel environmental noise. We develop a custom glasses prototype and evaluate it in a user study across 8 environments under mobility in the 100--1000 Hz frequency range, where environmental noise is concentrated. We achieve a mean noise reduction of 9.6 dB without any calibration, and 11.2 dB with a brief user-specific calibration.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
open-ear active noise cancellation
real-time ANC
wearable audio
microphone array
smart glasses
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